On the morning of the Fourth of July, the ATLAS experiment, based out of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, delivered findings to the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Australia that they have found evidence that was consistent with the existence Higgs boson.
The ATLAS experiment took 40 million collisions per second at the reactor, running every day since it came online in 2008.
The Higgs boson is significant because it’s discovery helps to describe how particles of matter obtain mass. The Higgs theory states that mass is a representation of the gravitational force, like charge is to the electromagnetic force.
Particles are attracted to each other by gravity in the Higgs field, which is quantified by mass. This is one important step in the goal of a scientific understanding of the Universe.
The Higgs Boson was first proposed as a theory in the 1960’s. After decades of research and 5,000 scientists later, the physicists who discovered what some call the “God particle” were overcome with joy.
Now that the Boson is discovered, the work starts here. Joe Incandela, who leads a team of scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara told ABC, “We’re talking about something we have no idea what the implications are and may not be directly applied for centuries.”
